A misunderstanding of the Gold Class

For some reason recently I've been getting an ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 when I try to go from one game to the next on Lexulous on my phone.

Never mind that the movie came out on December 20th in the U.S., December 26th in Australia, meaning that it is definitively yesterday's news at this point.

The thing I find funniest is that this is advertising Gold Class at Village Cinemas, which is the high-end screening experience that every cinema chain has, where the tickets are like $36.50 rather than closer to $20, and you can order food from your chair. I don't know if you get anything extra with the $36.50, like a drink. Maybe the chair also massages you. I'm not sure what advancements they may have pioneered since I last attended one of these several years ago.

I know you can order food in many non-special viewing environments nowadays, but these sorts of boutique experiences led the charge ten or 15 years ago when ordering food was less of a widespread option. And they obviously still do well enough as the concept still exists.

However, I doubt anyone who is shelling out the money for a Gold Class experience is actually going to see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ... regardless of how long it's been out.

I mean, you don't take kids to a Gold Class experience, do you? That kind of ruins the point of them trying to make it seem like an elevated, date night experience. I'm not sure if kids are specifically forbidden from this environment, but the chain would be well within their rights to do so, assuming they want to give their customers a prestige experience.

So I'm kind of surprised that they are even programming Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as a Gold Class option. I mean, each Village Cinemas only has one Gold Class screen, two at the most. At any given time, almost any other movie playing would be a better option for your finite space. 

Unless this ad is just marrying the Gold Class advertisement with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as two completely unrelated experiences, in which case, it's even dumber. 

Ursa Major on my movie screen

Short one today.

Last night I saw Saltburn, the second of two movies at the Village Cinemas in the increasingly moribund Jam Factory in South Yarra. I had arrived at 6:30 for an advanced screening of Ferrari, which doesn't open here for another month. To get this out of the way at the start, I liked both movies.

Writing about the Jam Factory today was one option, if I really wanted to depress myself. Might as well fit in some quick thoughts.

Indeed this was once a jam factory, and from the looks of it, they are trying to turn it into one again. When I first went there, the cinema -- which was always the centerpiece of the space -- was surrounded by clothing stores, restaurants and a Big W or KMart or Target, I can't remember which.

Now, all the restaurants and the Big Target Mart have closed, and the one remaining clothing store has its main entrance from the street. The entrance from the interior courtyard doesn't even open.

Here's a photo of the video screen on the way out. You can see behind it where some of the food court style restaurants used to be. This is what we call a "blue screen of death" in IT circles, when your computer has a fatal error that takes it out of the operating system entirely, and you have to reboot. I thought it was a good metaphor for the Jam Factory, only the reboot may never happen.

But instead of spending the lion's share of this post on what COVID hath wrought, I wanted to go slightly more optimistic and just talk about a possible sign of decline of the cinema ... or maybe just a maintenance issue that needs to be addressed.

My Saltburn screen had a mini big dipper on it.

Not the handle, just the dipping part.

What I mean by that is four small pricks in the surface of the screen that emitted a faint blue light from each. 

The small pricks were exactly in the shape of the four main parts of that most famous of constellations.

It's almost like it had to be intentional. How do you get four small pin pricks of equal size on your movie screen, spaced exactly perfectly to approximate Ursa Major? (If I'd been thinking of it, that's what I should have taken a picture of.) Sure, one pin prick could be an accident (if this is actually a physical hole) or screen degradation, but four spaced perfectly like this? Highly suss.

In any case, it did not sufficiently impact my viewing of Saltburn. I only really noticed it when the action on screen was particularly dark. (Which it always was in this movie, though in that case I'm using the word metaphorically rather than literally.) 

I'll have to try to go see something on screen 4 sometime early next year, to see if this is a recently occurring maintenance issue that will be fixed, or a precursor to the closing of the theater. If things are as depressing for Village Cinemas in this location as they are for the rest of the Jam Factory, they might just be letting themselves go in antiticaption of their own blue screen of death.

And here I thought this second point might be less depressing.